Here is another unknown & dark side of Rome, it was the 1680......when the door, now called "The Alchemical Door", was strongly desidered and built by the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara. He built the Magical Door in its residence, Villa Palombara, situated in the country side of Rome on the Esquilino hill nearly to the today called Piazza Vittorio, where today it has been placed. The interest of the Marquis for the alchemy was probably due to his frequentation, since 1656, of the roman Court of Queen Cristina of Sweden. The Queen was strongly fascinated by alchemy & science, she owned an advanced laboratory, managed by the alchemist Antonio Flag, in Palazzo Riario (today Palazzo Corsini center of the Lincei National Academy on the Gianicolo hill) that later became an Academy attended by all famous personages, erudites and esoteric doctors of that time as Francisco Giuseppe Borri, Giovanni Cassini, Francesco Maria Santinelli.
The Legend......
According to the legend, transmitted to us in 1802 thanks to the Abbot and erudite Francesco Girolamo Cancellieri, the story began when a travelling pilgrim identified with the alchemist Francesco Giustiniani Bono dwelled in the gardens of the Villa for a night searching for a mysterious grass able to produce gold. The following day he disappeared through the door leaving behind himself some gold straws, the result of one good ended "alchemica trasmutazione", and many other documents with mysterious enigmas and magical symbols hiding the secret of the "pietra filosofale" (do you remind about Harry Potter?! ;-)).
The Marquis decided to write down, on the five doors of Villa Palombara (today we can only see the Alchemical one), all the contents of the manuscript & all symbols & enigmas in hope that someone would be able to decipher them and transform things in gold. Perhaps the enigmatic paper could refer, for historical and geographic agreements, to the mysterious manuscript "Voynich" a part of the collection belonged to King Rodolfo II of Boemia.This is what we can see today in Piazza Vittorio....
Symbols....All symbols, affected on the Alchemical Door, come from the illustrations of alchemy and esoteric books, infact the design on the fronton (the two overlapping triangles) appears exactly equal on the frontespiece of the allegorical book "Aureum Seculum Redivivum" by Henricus Madatanus. The other Alchemical symbols, cram along the door (on the right and on the left), follow the sequence of planets, associated to the correspondents metals: Saturno-lead; Giove-pond;Marte-iron;Venere-branch;Luna-silver;Mercurio-mercury. Perhaps such a sequence comes resumption from the text "Commentatio de Pharmaco Catholico"published in the "Chymica Vannus" of the 1666. To every planet is associated a watertight maxim, to read from the bottom up to right in order to come down from above on the left, according the direction indicated from the hebrew maxim "Ruach Elohim".
The door must therefore be read like the monument that marks the historical passage of the upsetting symbols of Christianity towards the new spiritual model that was being developed in the 1600's.
Hope to have given you a pleasant passage through the Alchemical Door! :-) 
